Should hiring decisions weight a candidate's growth trajectory (slope) more heavily than their current level of accomplishment (asymptote)?

Daniel Ek · Mar 8, 2021

People are not static, so what should be assessed is an individual's rate of growth rather than their current level

Someone who used to be a talent may not be one today and someone who wasn't acing a previous job may be acing this one; growth is step-like rather than linear and must be extrapolated from few data points

Scope: extrapolation from few data points is inherently uncertain

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Miki Kuusi · Nov 28, 2022

You should hire for potential and take bets on people rather than hiring for logos and past experience, because successful companies are built by a large group of people doing the thing for the first time with you

You need to be able to grow a lot of people with the company

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Harry Stebbings · Dec 7, 2022

The best people will not leave incumbents or fast-growing companies for a very early-stage startup, so an early-stage company's job is to find the diamonds in the rough before they are diamonds

Scope: applies to really early stage startups

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Cristóbal Valenzuela · Aug 28, 2023

Hiring on credentials, elite universities and past companies is a mistake; you should hire people who are hungry and can figure things out and get things done

His own past hiring mistakes came from over-weighting credentials over drive

Scope: a baseline competence level per position still required

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Dominik Richter · Dec 1, 2023

For a few years after the founding period, startups should hire for raw smartness rather than experience, because such people become the deepest domain experts over five to seven years

The business is still figuring itself out and all domains are open, so scalable skill sets, personality and work ethic matter more than prior experience leading large organisations

Scope: applies to a specific window of a few years post-founding; his board pushed the opposite view at the time

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Chandra Narayanan · Mar 13, 2024

Hiring should weight slope (rate of growth) over asymptote (current level of accomplishment); the faster-growing person will overtake the more accomplished one

Compounding means someone growing faster catches up and passes a higher-but-flattening person; impressive profiles can mask a growth curve that has plateaued

Scope: requires willingness to invest in people over a long period; he admits he may still make this mistake

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Chandra Narayanan · Mar 13, 2024

The biggest hiring mistake for growth and analytics teams is optimizing for a candidate's asymptote (impressive profile from an amazing company) rather than their slope and fit for your specific company

An amazing profile from another company doesn't transfer to your context

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Jean-Michel Lemieux · Mar 20, 2024 · hedged

Prior industry or domain experience generally doesn't matter in hiring; what matters more is whether someone grows quickly and can see and fix multilayered problems

Most people can be thrown into the deep end of anything and will learn it; the interview process is about getting to know the human and matching their growth trajectory to the company

Scope: some domains give a genuine advantage — e.g. someone who has worked in a warehouse for a logistics company

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Miki Kuusi · Nov 28, 2022

Early-stage companies have to take bigger bets on unproven people, and in return get people who take a bigger bet on the company — producing a more entrepreneurial early team than a later-stage company could hire

A young startup cannot attract the credentialed profiles a large company can; the founder himself, a university dropout with no elite firm background, would at best qualify for customer support at today's Wolt

41:11 Early stage companies must bet on unproven people who bet back on the company

Marty Cagan · Dec 7, 2022

Interviewing for potential requires a fundamentally different process from interviewing for experience — instead of evidence they have learned the business, customers and techniques, you assess innate traits like work ethic, curiosity and persistence in the face of roadblocks

Assessing experience is straightforward because candidates can prove what they've learned; hiring on potential is a bet on traits instead

32:32 Interviewing for potential requires assessing innate traits not evidence of learned experience